Work | Act agentic

How to navigate your career

Before I joined a startup incubator last year, I never heard the word agentic. For all of you that also live behind rocks like me that means: A person who has high self-efficacy (believes they can change things) and proactiveness (actually does things). This is super helpful for anything Euzoia-related, but especially helpful for your career. Even if you don’t score super high on these traits, the key actions apply to everybody.

While this article is my own perspective, I am super happy I got to talk with Sofia Balderson, founder of Hive, about agency. In the podcast (youtube link) we talked about the book You Can Just Do Things, posts from her substack on accountability, emotions at work, and language learning, and her coaching business. She also posted her own take on agency on her blog. Check it out.

How to navigate your career

Agency in selecting your work

Performance differences within a field of work are high: A few people bring most of the results. The best way to find which work this is for you is to explore a lot, especially early in your career, to see what fits best. Then double-down later.

• Aim high: Early in your career you typically have little to lose. Use that to shoot for the stars, you can always do safer things later. How do you know you aimed high enough? If you failed or got rejected a lot. This also helps to minimize regret.

• Act like a scientist: Make a list of your best guesses for what would fit you best, then add more out-there options. Next, identify uncertainties you have on each, and resolve those by talking with people, doing work trials, doing internships.

• Do ABZ planning: Exploring and aiming high means taking risk and taking risk can feel uncomfortable. What helped me was ABZ planning: What’s my plan A. What’s plan B if that doesn’t work? What can I fall back to (Z) if nothing works?

Agency within your work

People are busy and overwhelmed. That doesn’t just apply to me but also to every manager I ever had. By acting agentically you save them the energy of having to manage you and at the same time buy yourself tons of freedom.

• Deliver impact: You are hired with a job description but at the end of the day what counts is: How much impact did you have on the success of the organization. Continuously find the best ways to do that. Look for leverage.

• Be autonomous: When impact is the “plus” on your internal balance sheet, the headspace required by others to get you there is the “minus”. This is why seniors are getting paid more then juniors. “They just get things done”.

• Ask for grease: “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” - be that wheel. Ask for support, feedback, resources, responsibility. You know your job better than your manager, and they’ll be grateful if you make sure you can do it.

Become ambitious

Nobody is born agentic, Turns out people are born agentic. 75% of variance in self-efficacy is explained by genes, according to twin studies. The same holds for grit, and the genetic factor increases with age. Nevertheless, you can still practice it:

• Track achievable goals: They should be at the sweet spot of achievable but still matter. To show you that you can make a difference through your actions. Tracking them helps build an evidence base you can look back on.

• Coaching and mentoring: Ideally from people in the domain you are practicing in. This could be a more senior person in your organization. They must be a) agentic and b) relatable to you. A role model for agency.

• Be ambitious: Once you built a solid level of agency, set ambitious goals you still believe are achievable. Think you are doing this already? Challenge yourself to be more ambitious. Picture your favorite celebrity: They also once set crazy goals.

Three starting points to become more agentic

• Journal / discuss with a friend: Is what you are doing right now the most ambitious thing you could be doing? How could you easily test options?

• Practice agency: Set one small goal that is achievable but a bit outside your usual zone. Track it.

• Want to dive deeper? A lot of this content is inspired by the 80,000 Hours guide.